Asymmetrical Information

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Up in Smoke

Well, it looks like New York City's ban on smoking in restaurants and bars will go into effect on March 30.

The libertarian in me mourns the abrogation of property rights. But the asthmatic in me is grateful that I don't have to pay for every night out with friends with a couple days of breathing trouble.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

The news isn't all bad

This year murders in Manhattan dipped to the lowest level since the 19th Century.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Krugmanwatch

Paul Krugman has a dismal column on the prospects for the economy in the coming year. One may hope that this is a variant of Irwin Fisher's permanently high plateau, but not too hard, since things don't look too good right now.

But one of the things I really hate about Krugman's New York Times columns is that in an effort to simplify things, he says things that may have a correct, more sophisticated basis, but for which the alleged evidence is insufficient. For example, he claims that states are going to have to raise regressive tax rates in order to meet the latest crisis:

Finally, there's the desperate plight of the states. New estimates by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities show that state governments are facing their worst fiscal crisis since the 1930's. Since Washington shows no interest in helping, states will be forced into desperate expedients. Taxes, mainly taxes that fall most heavily on the poor and the middle class, will go up. Spending on education and, especially, health care will be slashed, with the heaviest toll falling on struggling low-wage workers and their children. (Leave no child behind!)

First of all, the states got into this mess by spending the bejeesus out of capital gains income as if it would last forever; it's hard to feel to sorry for them.

More importantly, I know of no reason to think that tax measures are likely to be sharply regressive. (There may be one I don't know of.) Some states do get a significant portion of their funding from the sales tax, which is regressive. But more get them from income taxes, business taxes, and property taxes, most of which are definitely not regressive. And the more likely a state is to be in trouble, it seems to me, the more likely it is to be a rich old state, and thus to rely on non-regressive measures like income taxes, which are based on the (extremely progressive) federal tax code.

Now, it may be that there's some sort of data on this. But if there is, I wish he'd tell us rather than just asserting it.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Pledge Update

Incidentally, thanks to everyone who donated. By my count, we're now 43% of the way to a new computer, and just in time, since the old one has taken to randomly turning itself off.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Making Poor Countries Rich

The Elusive Quest for Growth

by William Easterly

To read this book is to exult and despair. Exult because it's a fascinating look at all the ways that we have tried to animate growth in the Third World; despair because none of them worked.

The book is terrific -- well written, interesting, and informative on a topic that most of us find pretty compelling. If it has a flaw, it is that it's a little light on data (though extensively footnoted), but I suspect that for most people, that's a feature not a bug. I raced through it over Christmas, enjoying every word.

Then I finished the book and was mightily depressed.

Easterly is an economist with the World Bank and he outlines in painstaking detail why the various theories of development aid, from closing the "investment gap" to building infrastructure, failed so miserably: incentives. No matter how much money you pour into a country, if local conditions make it unprofitable to build, trade, or invest, people will not do it. And the Third World countries that are mired in unpayable debt and abject poverty are a showcase of bad incentives. Property rights are ill-defined, so people will not build or invest; kleptocrats steal anything you do manage to make, so why bother? Short-sighted policies designed to shore up political support destroy or expropriate successful businesses -- why risk it? In those countries it's a better investment to buy a sinecure in a kleptocratic regime, or a gun to start your own free-lance kleptocracy, and that's what people do. And ship any money you make out of the country, where the locals can't inflate, tax, or steal it away.

And that's why it's so depressing. For the people currently in power in many of those countries, the incentives are to keep on with the failed structures of the past, either because they are making more money stealing than they could in private enterprise, or because the electorate is angry and desperate after years of stupid policies, and unwilling to bear further pain. Or they are mired in debt from previous kleptocratic regimes. Often all three.

The World Bank and associated organizations might be able to change those incentives, but while Easterly takes a half-hearted stab at making recommendations, it's clear even he doesn't really believe that these things will happen. The World Bank and the IMF lack the political or institutional will to simply cut off failing countries until they get their act together. And indeed, when tough love means, temporarily, more starving babies, it's hard to get enthusiastic. But unless they do, they are providing the incentive for the bad policies to continue.

One of the most interesting sections of the book discusses the question "What makes people poor", and argues that questioners have got it exactly backwards: the question should be "What makes people rich?" Poverty is freely available, and it's easy to produce; if you destroy the incentives for people to engage in wealth-building activities, such activities will cease. To make people rich, on the other hand, all sorts of things have to line up right: government, institutions, market systems. So perhaps one of the best things about this book is that in reading it, one appreciates just what a miracle our prosperity is.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

I've written that I didn't think the AOL/Time Warner merger was going to amount to much. But that was all theoretical stuff. Now Michael Wolff tells us the real reason.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

More On Lighthouses

Zimran Ahmed, who is closer to Chicago than I am, and thus more likely to be under the spell of their Evil Free Market Brain Wave Control Machine, has a much better post on lighthouses than I wrote.

To me this seems to fit perfectly well within the neo-classical economics systems. Chicago school economics is not against government regulation per se, it just feels that governments should support markets and let individuals sort it out from there, and that governments should not engage in social engineering. In the lighthouse example, private parties (the sailors) needed a two-part tariff system to create a market for a good they needed but would not otherwise be provided (lighthouses). They contracted with other private parties (ports) to arrange this, and the government supplied the legal infrastructure needed to support that market (making paying the tax mandatory).

Samuelson's public good argument had the entire population paying taxes to support lighthouses only used by sailors (which seems strange) and after 1836, the government itself started to operate lighthouses (which seems even stranger since private individuals were already doing that just fine). And perhaps most bizarrely, Daniel notes "...there are numerous accounts of "rent-seeking" behavior in lighthouses, whereby lighthouse entrepreneurs with good political connections sought to build unnecessary lighthouses in anticipation of the stream of light duties they would be allowed to extract" as if this refutes the neo-classical interpretation of what would happen in the market and seems to deny that exactly the same sort of rent-seeking would go on if the government ran lighthouses itself. Note how, in the US, states lobby for all kinds of unnecessary pork-barrel public works projects that seek only to transfer wealth from other states to their own.

I'll will also note that in 1995 in Britain, there were 56 automated lighthouses, 11 staffed lighthouses, 10 automated lightvessels, 2 automated lightfloats, 2 large automatic navigation buoys (lanbys), 414 buoys (of which 94 were unlit), 26 beacons, 62 radar or radio beacons, and 11 Decca Navigator stations. All in an age where a GPS system costs about $100. I'm not saying there would be more or less of these things if the government was not in the business of lighthouse provision and therefore had a bureaucracy invested in lighthouses, I'm just sayin'.

Which is not only decisive and succinct, but makes an important point: Chicago school economics is not, as its more ignorant critics believe, a faith in the simplistic perfect competition model you learned in Micro 101. Many, many (Lord, how many!) of the emails I get triumphantly present me with some market failure that has been well known to economists for fifty or so years, discussed, analyzed, and modeled. That's the gist of this stupid speech by Eliot Spitzer. Chicago school economics can most easily be summed up by saying "Incentives matter. . . and while markets may fail, government fails worse." Government provides perverse incentives, for example to make money by lobbying the government to take it from someone else rather than make or do something that other people want to buy.

It also, as the example of lighthouses in an age of GPS illustrates, is extremely unresponsive to change. Eventually, GPS will replace lighthouses. (I don't know if the technology is there yet.) But it will take a lot longer than in the free market, because those lighthouses have voters who work there, and Societies for the Preservation of Lighthouses, and ignorant editorialists who will declaim the need for safety long after lighthouses are necessary, and important bureaucrats with pals in the right places who will fight hard against having their agency disbanded. It is possible that lighthouses were best provided by the government (I'm still not prepared to argue that point right now.) But government services are very rigid. It's much easier to get the government to do something than to get it to stop.

That's sort of how I feel about SEC regulation. Perhaps Glass-Steagall was a model of financial brilliance. Now, however, I'd argue that it forms a barrier to entry for financial firms which has kept fees in the securities listing market outrageously, mind-bogglingly, ridiculously high -- I'm running out of adjectives for how outlandish I think investment banking compensation is, and I still can't express it. It's legalized robbery, abetted by the SEC. Undoubtedly the SEC does good things. But it also does bad things, and not just because it's underfunded or whatever the argument of the week is. I blame the SEC for the diseased culture that prevailed in parts of the industry that encouraged record IPO pops for special friends, analysts touting dog stocks, and all the rest of it. Mind you, being a Chicago gal, I think there would still be chicanery; I don't believe in the perfectability of markets or human nature. But I think that the SEC was what allowed many of these practices to become institutionalized, because it prevented newcomers from competing away the enormous financial incentives to cheat. That's why I have to laugh when people write me to tell me [insert financial regulation aimed at executive compensation, company disclosure, or what have you] must be correct and reasonable -- even John Corzine supports it! John Corzine made all of his money helping businesses comply with SEC regulations in raising money or structuring deals. Of course he's in favor of more regulation. More regulation means more little bankers beavering away earning him dividends on his Goldman stock. Not that this means he's necessarily dishonest. Curiously, almost all of us can generate a compelling belief in the truth, beauty, and good of the regulatory structures that make us lots of money. If you want a stirring speech, find a farmer and ask him to tell you how farm subsidies benefit the rest of us. If you aren't wiping away a tear or two at the end, you have no heart.

But the heart of Glass Steagall -- that we need a lot of intensely regulated firms providing us special financial services -- is not going away, even as surface forms change. Even though I haven't noticed any shortage of bad stock tips and horrible financial advice emanating from said firms, there is no significant move to change the structure, find out what rules don't work, or otherwise mess with the perogatives of the bankers and their regulators. Almost any regulation, to be removed, has to be truly dreadful, or have a wealthier and louder constituency advocating its removal than those behind it. The impetus of any agency is to do ever-more, not less. I've yet to see any regulator say "stick a fork in it -- we're done."

So there's your little dose of free market religion for the day. Tomorrow: why Jesus loves an appropriately diversified portfolio.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Mark Kleiman follows up on my earlier post on charity by asking why we want to have engineers doing charity work -- isn't it more efficient to have such things done by professionals? It's a good question, but I think there are some problems with the "professional" model.

First of all, it assumes that professionals are competent, which is not necessarily the case. I invite anyone who doubts me to go work in the government office of their choosing and calculate the ratio of dedicated professionals to chair-warmers trying to rack up their 25 and get home to the barcalounger. Social workers can be talented dedicated professionals, but they can also be aimless 22-year olds who didn't know what they were getting into, or tired forty-five year olds who hate their clients but can't find anything that pays better.

Second of all, institutional services are very bad at doing a lot of the things that the clients we worked with seemed to need most. For example, a kid who has the potential to be an engineer needs someone to provide the roadmap to get there, constant feedback, encouragement when he encounters setbacks -- the things his parents can't provide because his Dad's not there and no one in his mother's family has held a long-term job in recent memory. The social worker has perhaps thirty families to work with, many of whom have active pathologies such as drug use, violence, etc. The gifted ones fall through the cracks (and yes, you could increase funding, but you're talking about an unrealistic increase in welfare spending, since to get more qualified caseworkers you'd have to drastically raise their salaries.) Also, the social worker doesn't really know how to get to be an engineer. The social worker has an entirely different life history and basket of skills. At best, she can refer him to someone who knows how to be an engineer -- who is not likely to be a professional social worker. Like, oh, say, you.

Private individuals are better at many kinds of charity for the same reason that individual parents, even no very good ones, are better than orphanages. People are very complicated, and they require a complicated response, not the kind of cookie-cutter programs that government, by its nature, churns out.

Now, there are some problems that the government can solve. If you're hungry it can buy you food. If you need clothes, it can buy them for you. If you have nowhere to stay, it can build you shelter. But I would argue that these are not, by and large, the problems of today's poor.

Today's poor are more likely to be overnourished than to go hungry (and the ones who are undernourished are the ones who do not or cannot apply for government assistance.)

Today's poor have somewhere to stay. Contrary to popular belief, there is almsot no such animal as the "homeless family" in the way advocates want you to picture it -- women and their children living on the streets. There are families who have no where of their own to live, but the government does not let them stay on the streets. They are put in various sorts of temporary living arrangements while the state seeks permanent shelter and a variety of complementary services for them. The people on the street are generally the severely dysfunctional: people who cannot or will not live by the rules of the shelters, either because they are violent, steal, or abuse drugs and alchohol. Or they are mentally ill, off their meds, and choosing, insofar as a delusional schizophrenic can be said to choose, to stay on the streets.

Today's poor have clothes. What they suffer is a lack of status clothes; their clothes are out of date, cheap, and serviceable. But you can buy the poor anything you want and those with a little more money will find a way to differentiate themselves. You can provide adequate covering to someone who is cold; you cannot eliminate the pecking order of the primate family.

What don't the poor have? They have no control over their lives; they exist at the sufferance of the government agencies who provide their support. They have horrible housing made horrible by other poor people, antisocial ones, who trash it, and who must be allowed to live there because the government is not a private landlord and cannot differentiate between tenants. They have no hope. Their schools suck, their job opportunities suck, and they don't know how to make better opportunities for themselves. They lack job skills. They have trouble reading. They lack the accumulated social capital that was transmitted to you by parents and peers, you lucky middle class dog, you. Institutions are just awful at remedying these deficits. Often they are the cause of them.

What volunteer work does, I think, is integrate into the web of prosperous middle class society the people who have fallen out of it. The government can't do that by giving money because, among other things, work is one of the core features of middle class American life; and also because it's trying to hit a moving target: as long as we maintain our primate heritage, and the ability to differentiate, there will be a bottom quintile as well as a top quintile, and raising up the bottom won't erase the distinction, which is really what most people want to get rid of. Perhaps it's good for the person doing the volunteering, but I don't really care; I think it's better for the needy to be treated like fellow human beings than cases to be "managed".

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Homicide Rates Redux

Dr. Weevil has a nice follow-up post on the effect of medical care on homicide rates.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Public Service Announcement

This year, I am not going to be irritated by snotty comments.

And the reason I'm not going to be irritated by them is that I'm going to delete them.

I don't really moderate the comments, because my feeling is that if I start editing them, the temptation will be to edit out the stuff that puts me in a bad light, and that sorta damages the whole point of the blog. I mostly edit for repetition or profanity.

But then there are those very special people. You know who you are. You don't like me, and you don't like my site, and it just makes you mad that I'm around. This raises some disturbing questions about the sheer amount of time you spend poring over my driveling idiocy -- I hate to say get a hobby, but my sweet, someone has to.

It's a hard life you live, isn't it? You know deep in your heart how much cleverer you are than I am, and funnier, and how much better you write, and how much more you know about everything, and you long to prove that by. . . well, apparently by writing in the patronizing tones adopted by insecure fifth graders, calling me names, or inserting sarcastic comments. When I respond to you, you ignore the substance in order to make hysterical accusations about my motivation, personal habits, or erudition. You are abnormally fixated on my degree. You display a less than touching concern with my dating life, especially when it is not the topic under discussion. When you want to come up with a really devastating rejoinder, you rack your memories for the snappy comments that served you so well in eighth grade.

It is a great consolation to me that you don't annoy me half as much as I apparently annoy you. And the good news is that you're not going to annoy me at all, because comments that have an excessively nasty tone will henceforth be deleted on my threads. That will save us the boredom of reading them, and you the trouble of composing them. I might add that since I'm already deleting the emails with headings like "You're a [expletive deleted] idiot.", you'll be getting a lot of rest for those little fingers. It'll be good for you, really. Repetitive stress injuries are no joke, you know. Besides, if your mother didn't warn you, your face can freeze that way and then where will you be? Probably home composing aimless rants to right-wing bloggers. And really, there has to be something more interesting with which to fill your otherwise empty weekend nights.

No, don't thank me. I'm a giver.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Coase Uncovered?

Daniel Davies goes the extra mile to debunk Ronald Coase's claim, in a public argument with Paul Samuelson, that lighthouses were, in fact, provided by private enterprise before the government got involved. Mark Kleiman sums it up best:

Daniel Davies of the D-Squared Digest reviews the bidding on the economic history of lighthouses and the famous Coase/Samuelson controversy about public goods. Yes, lighthouses were provided by private entrepreneurs, not by public agencies. But the payments from shipowners were imposed by law, not negotiated, and the system didn't work very well. Score one for the interventionist side.

I'm not going to comment on the core argument, because I haven't followed the argument that closely. But Davies is a smart fellow and seems to be honest enough, so you can decide for yourself. Myself, I think it's entirely possible that lighthouses are public goods, but don't particularly care, and I still like Coase's work. So I'm not making any substantive arguments, just quibbling, which is really what I do best.

Anyway, there are a couple of problems with this. Davies argues first, that lighthouses were really a government intervention project, because they operated under government warrants. If this is true, they operate under a form of taxation that is generally held in higher regard by libertarians than the pernicious general tax: usage fees. Such fees include the tolls you pay for your roads that cover general upkeep. There is theoretically no reason that a private market structure couldn't mimic this with roads, and some other services, although in the case of the ports they would have to operate under a cartel that wouldn't be much more attractive than the government (and might be less so) in order to ensure that fees were applied to all necessary lighthouses. On the plus side, it would align the incentives correctly: the port owners want to maximize traffic.

For remember, governments don't necessarily, which is a problem with Davies other main argument: that Samuelson was claiming, not that private enterprise couldn't provide lighthouses, but that it couldn't provide them at an optimal level. This assumes that governments want to provide them at a utility maximizing level, which is not true. Smugglers, for example, may wish to use some of your lighthouses. The government will not place them, even though it would maximize net utility. Or the government may wish to see ships crash. Crazy? Not necessarily. If you're a government of a small country near a large country, you could conceivably up your GDP by steering a small fraction of ships bound for their ports onto your shoals for looting. Indeed, it was common practice in the eighteenth and nineteenth century for private enterprise to provide this service: hobble a mule and tie a lantern to it, then walk it up and down the beach. The motion mimicked that of a safety buoy, and ships steered to their doom. As I recall, the Isle of Man, which Davies mentioned, was known for this. If they'd had their own government, one wonders what the lighthouse configuration might have looked like.

I don't know that this is the case, although I seem to recall there were some countries which practiced this sort of subterfuge to enrich the crown. But even if they didn't, Davies argument is hardly a testimony to the wonders of government intervention. If he is correct, and the lighthouses were provided before by government intervention, and that the provision was suboptimal, then all it seems to prove is that government is as likely as not to get it wrong. There's no reason that I know to think that any of the government provisions of what they call public goods are at anything resembling an optimal level, and this example seems to illustrate that precept beautifully. Not a sterling recommendation for the wonders of the Visible Hand.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Charity Begins at Home

I part company with libertarians who think we can get government out of the charity business. Advocates often seem so infatuated with the free market that they believe it applies everywhere, which is silly; there's no equilibriating mechanism I can see to ensure that the demand for charity equals the supply. So, given that most of us feel a genuine obligation to help the genuinely needy -- those whose physical or intellectual endowments are insufficient for them to earn a decent living -- the government will, at the very least, have to be the charity provider of last resort.

That view is not incompatible with the belief that private charity does a better job, on average, than government charity. Not always or in every case, of course. But government charity is, by its nature, one size fits all. It is also, by its nature, generally designed to eliminate false negatives, at the risk of creating false positives.

One of the central problems with charity is that Americans by and large wish to help the deserving -- those who are doing their best and just can't make it, for some reason -- but not the undeserving. The problem is that there is not now, nor ever will be, a perfect mechanism for separating the deserving from those looking to get a free ride. If you focus on excluding the undeserving, you will probably miss some deserving cases; if you focus on including every deserving case, you will include some who do not deserve your help. The larger and broader the program, the worse this problem becomes, because the criteria necessarily become very crude, and because government, by its structure and for some very good reasons, relies on rules over individual judgement for the awarding of charity.

If the number is small, this is not much of an issue. But the effects of welfare reform seem to indicate that the number was not small, and probably is still not small in states that are gutting work requirements or time limits. And giving money to people who don't need it is a violation of the wishes of the voters who pay for it. It also creates a great deal of social pathology.

In Europe, I gather from my friends, the idea is that it's all right to pay people to stay in their houses staring at the walls all day because they're just human cattle (I mean, they don't put it that way, but that's the gist), and they're not going to have any sort of a worthwhile life anyway, so who cares if they're stuck in a council flat with no hope of anything better. But Americans don't think that way. It's not just resentment at paying taxes. It's a recognition that most of us are not so motivated as to achieve without the impetus of need riding hard behind us, and that if benefits are sufficiently generous, there are a lot of people who could be working who won't.

Is public charity degrading? I don't know, is it degrading to expect to subsist without effort, as many of our clients did until someone kicked their ass for them? As most people do, until their parents throw them out into the world? It's not degrading to expect it, I suppose, but the yankee in me feels there's something degrading in living that way.

Don't get me wrong; I've worked for a public service provider. I am not under the impression, apparently common in some of our more callous suburbs, that welfare benefits are the key to a life of plenty and leisure. Welfare benefits leave damn little money for fun. But relative to the immediate choice of working at some crappy job for not so much money, it's not that bad. There are also interesting questions of the marginal tax rates imposed by benefit cuts, but that's another post. Anyway, the point is that welfare recipients, especially and the long term, pathological welfare recipients we worked with, are making a logical choice between staying home and getting crappy money, or going to work and getting nearly as crappy money. You'd stay home too, if you didn't have parents who made you get a job or get out of the house.

Personally, I needed my crappy jobs to teach me to show up on time every single time, to organize things, to be nice to customers who were nasty, to do stupid unnecessary things just because my boss wanted them, to budget my time, and all the other unlovely skills we must acquire in order to get a better job. And indeed, much of our experience with welfare recipients was that they were willing to work -- just not at the entry level jobs they needed to take in order to gain experience to get a better one.

[Yes, I know that not everyone gets a better job. But sure as hell no one's going to hire them until they get that first job stocking shelves or mopping floors].

Private charity is better at dealing with these things than we were. But they were better at it because they risked creating false negatives: they kicked out people who, in their judgement, weren't trying hard enough. Government programs, or programs that take Uncle Sam's money, can't do that. You can kick them out for using drugs or violating a number of very specific rules, but you can't kick them out because the social worker thinks they're deliberately spiking their job interviews, or starting fights with their boss so they can get fired and go back on the dole. Yes, people do do that, and don't send me the emails telling me I wouldn't say that if I'd ever been poor. Sanctifying the poor into a bunch of people who would never, ever do wrong is no more illuminating than deciding they're all a bunch of lazy good-for-nothings trying to leech off the body politic. And for reference, I have known a number of middle class children who pulled similar stunts as long as the parental dole was still paying out.

The taxpayers who are paying for the programs don't want to support the people who are able, but unwilling to work, just as they do want to support those who are willing, but unable. And supporting the former group has consequences for the rest of us. It takes people out of the workforce, for one thing. For example, one of my statistics professors averred that the most effective way to reduce repetitive stress injuries and back pain in the United States was to reduce the workmen's comp for them, since there is a nearly 1-to-1 relationship between changes in the level of compensation for those sorts of injuries, and the number of them reported by doctors.

[Other studies apparently suggest that the pain is psychosomatic, not faked. In which case, we really might be doing the recipients a favor. But I'm not a doctor, nor a statistician. I'm just repeating what I'm told.]

But that does not imply that private charity is perfect. Mark Kleiman points to a post by Jeanne D'Arc that points up all the problems with private charity, starting with the people who donate the stuff. Listen up: I too have given into the temptation to clean out my stock of unwanted canned goods at the annual Thanksgiving drive. But there is a difference between realizing that you're never going to eat those seventeen cans of Dole Peaches in Light Syrup you bought because you made the mistake of shopping when you were hungry and canned fruit was on special, and hauling out the ten-year old can of -- er, something -- with the dents and the label ripped off so you can give the very special gift of botulism to some needy family this holiday season. And the needy are not needy enough to require your old gym socks. IF you want to give underwear, for gosh sakes go down to Wal-Mart and pick up a shiny new six pack of Jockeys. Sheesh.

Nor is charity an excuse for parading how gosh darned good you are to all and sundry. I used to mentor a little boy at one of our facilities, and half the people there seemed to expect to be beatified for the incredible sacrifice of two hours every Thursday making crayon drawings and doing math homework. I'm sorry, but what with Tivo and all, I find it hard to imagine what's so gosh darned important that you can't spare a couple hours a week. Charity is about the people who need help, not about you. I mean, it is a bonus if you enjoy crayoning, but that's not the point of the thing. Just as with your own children, one must crayon and do math homework even when you have much more interesting possibilities.

Ultra-libertarians are on the wrong side of the question of whether a decent society lets the helpless fend for themselves. Conservatives in general may be too optimistic about the possibilities of private charity. Certainly volunteers on the right and left are prone to putting the focus on themselves, instead of the people they're supposed to be happening. But deciding that government charity is superior is not the answer either, not only because its sorting method is very poor, but also because what the poor lack now is generally not money, but the social network that helps out the rest of us in innumerable ways in times of trouble. There are far, far too many liberals of my acquaintance who are willing to pay tax dollars, but not to get in there and actually work with the poor. They don't have time, they don't want to be bothered, (my favorite) they "wouldn't be any good at it" . . . well, I'm sure there's something you're good at. Other than making excuses. The poor have reached the limits of what tax money can buy them. Their problems are more complicated than hunger or lack of shelter, and that means they need real live people helping them out. That means you, "but I voted for the Senator who wanted to increase the budget for food stamps!" It's time for people to realize that nothing is a panacea, and that while we all need a little safety net, it's a lot better to help people to walk the tightrope than to catch them when they fall.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Attack of the Clones

I'm too lazy to find out if I'm the eighth, or the eighty-millionth, to use that particular headline.

At any rate, it seems that a religious sect which believes all life on earth is descended from aliens who created it 25,000 years ago via genetic engineering, are claiming they've created and birthed the first human clone.

(And how few of you will appreciate the heroic effort it took me to write that sentence without once using the word "nutjob" anywhere. Greatness has its price.)

Here's the thing: I can't for the life of me figure out why I'm supposed to care. It's a baby. It's got the same genetic material as someone else, which is also true any time identical twins are born.

I mean, I can see problems with it. For one thing, they created and killed a lot of embryos to get one live baby; if you're pro-life, that's pretty disturbing. For another, our experience with animal clones seems to indicate that the child may well have premature aging or other genetic problems. It seems a lot of effort to go through to produce a sickly child, when you can get a (probably) healthy one with a lot less effort and a lot more fun. And this really seems to cross the line into human experimentation -- but is it really crossing a new line? The procedure is probably less intrusive and dangerous than what we did to get the first test tube babies, or for that matter, what goes on in your average fertility clinic today.

But my sister, the social conservative, seems to think that it's just a short step to Dr. Mengele's laboratory, and they've got talking heads on all the cable networks who seem genuinely convinced that we've just opened an era of human enslavement undreamt of outside of SF novels. Myself, I don't see it. The most frightening thing I can think of is that if it got safe and cheap, people who don't understand that their clone won't actually be them will deplete our genetic diversity by trying to convert the species to asexual reproduction.

But to be honest, I just don't think asexual reproduction's going to catch on any time soon.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Question for the Day

It is common, at least in certain circles, to refer to the stalwarts of the left as "Reds", and their slightly more moderate brethren as "Pinkos".

What color, then, are their compatriots on the right? (Answers involving the Confederate flag will, thank you my little rabble-rousers, be discarded)

They don't really seem to have a color -- why?

And why did the networks make the Democrats, historically closer to the pinkos, blue, while making the Republicans red?

Are conservatives now "Pinkos" and "Reds", and if so, what color are the liberals?

Except, as the networks seem to have predicted, awfully blue?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Thought for the Day

This one's for all you students out there; a helpful hint from the Cranky Prof before he heads off for sunny Italy and ceases, we assume, to crank.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Christmas Eve Poem

A correspondent sent this along, and I rather like it.

The Oxen by Thomas Hardy

Christmas Eve and twelve of the clock,
"Now they are all on their knees",
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
"Come; see the oxen kneel

In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know",
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.

Merry Christmas my blogging friends! Three little Dreck children snooze lightly in anticipation of tomorrow, and I, briefly an impostor in my own house, am off to eat cookies, nibble on carrots and place a few footprints with fireplace soot.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Well, I'm sitting here in the charming public library of Newark, New York, Jewel of the Finger Lakes, ancestral home of the Jane Galt Line. I appear to have stepped back through a time warp -- not only is my access to the internet practically non-existant (The snakes! The snakes!), but also, I have been entirely preoccupied with the sort of antediluvian baking frenzy normally associated with Very Special Christmas Movies set in the 19th century. If there is anything more disturbing than a vegetarian putting together the pre-Christmas ham, I am hard put to think of it.

(Incidentally, if you want a great glazed ham take a box of brown sugar, a tablespoon or so of hot dry mustard, and mix in enough scotch to make the entire thing the consistency of damp sand. Slap it on the ham along with any cloves or sundries you like early in the morning. A couple hours before dinner, pop it in the oven for an hour and a half at 400, until the glaze is shiny. Guaranteed delicious. If you eat meat. Me, I just watch.)

So far I have produced three sorts of cookies, banana bread, a glazed ham, ham and cheese rolls, assorted vegetables and desserts, and I've batted backup on sundries like scalloped potatoes and sour cherry pie. I've been busy. I'm also afraid I may not fit in the car to go back to New York.

But there are compensations. We've had snow, and the dog is in seventh heaven. Also, my grandparents, who are delightfully Victorian, make me feel re-connected with my roots. Favorite quote of the week:

Grandpa: So I couldn't find the cane at the DAR house, and I thought she might have left it at the United Methodist, but when I went over there the darn church was locked up tight. . .

Grandma: George! (Shocked) You hadn't ought to have said "darn" in front of the girls.

Of course, it's a little sad, too. My grandparents grew up on farms in small town America back when small town America was a world nearly as alien to the city as Afghanistan is to us. My mother lived off the farm, but grew up in a small town. I know what it was like through their memories, but my children won't really, and probably they'll never visit enough to remember it. And their children. . . seeing how old my grandparents are reminds me how much of our history we are always losing, irreplaceably, as the people who remember it pass.

But this Christmas is good. We're having an enormous dinner for an enormous number of relatives, and if it has been a bad year for everyone, enough of my relatives lived through the Depression that we can't really take it too seriously. And it's good to be all together again.

I won't be able to blog much this week, but I hope that all of you are having as nice a Christmas as I am.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

A very merry Christmas

You guys are awesome. Did I mention that I love you all? As of this morning we are 20% of the way to our goal of replacing the 5 year old Dell I'm currently working on with something a little more modern. In which category, one might include an abacus, but never mind.

Anyway, to all those who contributed, thanks. I hope this means you enjoy the site and want to keep reading it. To all those who didn't -- I hope you're enjoying the site too. Believe me, we at Asymmetrical Information understand the concept of tight budgets this year.

Speaking of which, I should have told you -- I meant to -- that none of the money you donate goes to Mindles. Not because I'm greedy; fair's fair, and he certainly earns half of it. But his company won't let him take it. So when you click through to buy a book, or merchandise, or donate, the money goes to me. If you didn't understand that, and want your money back, I'd be happy to refund it -- just shoot me an email with the date, time, and amount of your contribution. Don't be embarassed; the error is mine.

Anyway, thanks so much to everyone for helping me make the site the success it is. I'm off now to Upstate New York, but never fear! I have my sister's laptop, and will still be blogging periodically. Merry New Year and Happy Holidays to everyone.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Rod Dreher, a Southernor, thinks racism is dying in the South too.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Useful Idiots

The American Mind has this completely idiotic quote from some well meaning fool in the heartland:

I don't think we respond to the horrors of Sept. 11 with more violence. [T]hen Osama Bin Laden has already won.

Why, yes, of course. Once we've blown him up, killed his followers, destroyed his terror network, put the fear of God into any countries that might consider harboring or assisting his merry band of murderers, wiped him and his buddies clean off the face of the planet. . . why, Osama will have gotten exactly what he wanted. And to think we almost walked right into that diabolically clever trap!

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Lott Delenda Est

So Trent Lott has declared he's stepping down.

It's a good thing for the party, and it's a good thing for Lott, ultimately; he'll have a soft landing and wind up an elder statesman.

I think what we just witnessed is the spine of the Democrat's base cracking. And possibly the spine of the Republicans' much derided Southern strategy, though as a Northerner born and bread, I don't know how much of that is race and how much culture and religion. One can argue the extent to which Democratic policy agendas are driven by race, but it's hard to deny that, at least on the coasts, a very large portion of their get-out-vote efforts are predicated on some version of "The other guys are a bunch of racist, sexist bastards. You'd better vote for us or they'll bring back the Klan."

But whether or not this is true of the party elders, that is the party's past, not it's futures. The younger generation, say those who came of age after the convulsions that petered out in the late seventies, doesn't think blacks are inferior. They don't feel guilty about race, or responsible for discrimination, the way their parents did, which undercuts some of the support for policies like affirmative action among whites. And the expansion of opportunities for minorities will erode the beleaguered fortress mentality that lets parties "own" ethnic groups; historically the more ethnic groups have have advanced economically, the less they have felt they needed one party to provide patronage and fight for opportunity. The only notable exception is Jewish voters, but they remain abnormally concentrated on the coasts, and also, the Democrats may be losing them over Israel and the war.

That's why I was so interested in Judis and Teixera's book,
The Emerging Democratic Majority
. I haven't read the book yet; only the article they drew from it. But what struck me was that while their discussion of the demographic changes they expected to form that majority might be sound, they were making unwarranted assumptions about the import of those changes. To wit, they were assuming that the traditional allegiance of the growing ethnic groups to the liberal wing of the Democratic Party would remain. But historically, that has not been the case. Until the 60's, the Irish and the Italians were the backbone of the Democratic Party; now that connection fades more every year. The alignment of, for example, blacks and the Democrats, is much less long-standing. If my cousins and I an contemplate leaving The Party, then the next generation of African Americans can too.

That of course does not mean that the Democratic Party is doomed; I think the two party system will be with us for some time to come. But of course, current people don't merely want the Democratic Party to stay around; they want it to move left, right, or in a few cases, stay right where it is. I think the decline of race also means the decline of some important Democratic policy priorities, many of which are predicated on the idea that poor people are poor because of external, immovable oppression. As race declines in the popular consciosness, so does the belief in a fixed wall of poverty. The issues that are likely to receive the most focus are not ones where Democrats are strongly positioned; education, the most likely candidate, will hurt them because of their base in local school boards and the strong influence of the teachers unions, which will prevent the party from proposing strong policy changes.

I'm sure this means changes for the Republicans as well. But overall, I think this helps them. Over the last several years, they've proved that when their politicians make errors, they clean house -- a cudgel they can use to beat the Democrats in their own circles. Anyway, they've certainly proved one thing; whatever may have happened in the past, the Republicans are intent on regaining the mantle of the Party of Lincoln.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Holy dinero, batman!

If Andrew Sullivan can raise $80,000 from his readers, surely the Asymmetrical Information readers can come through with a new computer to replace the sad, limping computer that their favorite female economics-and-bullmastiff blogger in the over-six-foot category has to make do with? I mean, I hate to appeal to pity, but we are unemployed. . . and the computer's about an inch away from dying. . . and we don't have a computer at work like other bloggers, so if this one goes, so does the blogging. . . and we don't like to say it, but we've felt for a long while that you loved other bloggers better. . . when we're so fond of you. We stay up at nights worrying about you. . . what you like to read, what you do with your spare time, whether you're remembering to put your thermals on and button up tight before you head out in the cold to shovel the driveway. We care. And if you care too, we invite you to say it the old fashioned way. . . with cash. Because we love you. And we're going to get up and say it to each of you, personally, with a hug and a nice note on our very own stationery.

Just as soon as we get the computer fixed, that is.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Love this line from a Slate article about gun litigation:

That's how McDermott realized that if he could force cheap gun-makers—who nearly all had either no insurance or Holladay's sleazy insurance—into getting legitimate insurance, he would effectively end their racket of dumping millions of unreliable handguns on the poor. Since these companies made riskier products, their rates would become much higher than the legitimate companies—if any insurer would touch them at all.

Reading that, you'd think that the lawsuits were product liability suits designed to protect consumers from malfunctioning guns. But the lawsuits are actually about products that functioned perfectly -- when their owner made a decision to pick the gun up and shoot someone. The liability suits assign the majority of the liability to the companies, despite the fact that there seems to be no characteristic of the gun that causes its owner to shoot people. There is no defect of design that makes the owner decide to commit murder, that can distinguish the "malfunctioning" gun from the majority of such guns which were sold to people who did not use them to murder someone. The only difference lies in the owner -- yet the suits blame the gun.

This is our old friend paternalism. We have to outlaw cheap guns because poor people are scary, and while they may have rights, they can only have them in a limited, protected way. They're like children, you see. And like children, they can't be trusted, so we have to keep grownup things away from them, whatever the cost to their liberty -- and ours.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Economics in One Lesson

Economics in One Lesson: 50th Anniversary Edition

By Henry Hazlitt

I get a fair number of emails asking me to recommend books about economics. You can't do better than this one.

One of the hardest things about learning economics is learning to look beyond your first order intuitions to second order effects. A classic example of this is supply side arguments for tax cuts. Supply siders say that tax cuts increase the incentive to work, by allowing workers to keep more of their money, and thereby grow the economy. Intuitively, this makes sense. Yet, surprisingly, there is little empirical evidence for this proposition. This starts to make sense if you add in other, slightly less obvious intuitions about our demand for work vs. leisure, a detailed explanation of which can be found here.

Hazlitt does an excellent job of puncturing common economic fallacies by leading the reader, in simple, easy-to-understand language, through the second order effects.

It's also a fascinating read for the historically minded. Some of the fallacies he punctures are no longer in common currency, but a surprising number of them are, such as the belief that tax cuts targeted at lower income brackets are magically better for the economy because, the advocates tell us, the poor spend their money, while the rich save it; or the idea that the government can grow the economy over the long term by running a deficit, which is used by both right and left to justify their pet policy boondoggles.

The book is not flawless. Hazlitt is a strict classical economist, which makes him rather more rigid on some topics than is current in economic thought. His discussion on money, in particular, leaves something to be desired; he uses a model of money that's far too simple, and this makes him an inflation hawk to put the Bundesbank to shame. On the other hand, one has to remember that Hazlitt was a practicing economist from World War II to the late seventies, the heydey of well-meaning idiots who wanted to print their way to prosperity. When inflation is in the double digits, it's better to be hawkish than lax -- but the reader would be well advised to remember that money is a very, very complex topic, and he's not necessarily giving you the whole story.

Nonetheless, the beginning amateur economist can't do better for a useful, simple primer. It's sufficiently broad to help you understand many of the policy topics of hte day, yet sufficiently simple that you can read and understand it in your spare time. Take it with you through the newspaper and see if it doesn't help you figure out what all those talking heads are blathering about.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Guns don't kill people, idiots do.

Rob Lyman writes a compelling piece on newbie shooters, arguing persuasively that the problem is not the guns, but the fact that people who are forbidden to have guns tend to act like jerks when they finally get their hands on one.

Which, unsurprisingly, reminds me of a story.

I used to be a pretty decent rifle shot when I was at camp. So my last year there, because there were so many kids who wanted to shoot, I got to be one of the deputy instructors who reviewed the rules of range safety and demonstrated the basics of loading and firing the rifles.

We had there a kid we'll call James. James was actually my age, but didn't act it. He saw that the .22's he'd been given to shoot were much less powerful than the guns the more experienced shots were using; I, for example, was trying to master the kick of a .30-06. (Don't laugh at me; in high school I was 6'2 and weighed 115. It was a miracle I could hold a .22 still, 'kay?) James wanted to shoot a more powerful gun. He whined and whined until the instructor, who should have known better, told me to give him my .30-06. I confess I was glad to do it; my shoulder and arms felt like someone had taken a truncheon to them.

Did I mention it was loaded? I did to James, several times. "It's loaded," I told him, when I handed it to him. "Don't forget, it's loaded," I told him again, when he started to toy with it. "Careful, it's loaded," I said, when the instructor was called over to deal with a problem down the line and told everyone to put their guns down.

To round out the story, James had a friend named Alex, who was learning to use a .22 bolt action like everyone else. They were bored, waiting there on the firing platforms for the instructor to come back. They started chucking rocks at prairie dogs, which we called "pickup hens".

I think you can see where this is going. Just one more detail: while the firing range was set up so that there was about a five-mile clear run beyond the target area to the next human habitation, we weren't all that far from the buildings; they were maybe a hundred yards or so off to our right.

Have you ever seen something happen too late to stop it, but not too late to appreciate the horror of what is about to take place? I saw James and Alex pick up their guns, but didn't even have time to shout "No!" before James had swung his gun up. He didn't jam it against his shoulder, but held it loosely in general shoulder area while he aimed at a prairie dog and fired in the direction of the buildings a hundred yards away.

The non-shooters among you may not be sufficiently horrified by that. It's like. . . a non-Catholic taking communion at the Vatican. Making a bonfire out of Old Masters. Selling your own child to white slavers. It's unthinkable. Unless you are a soldier, you never, ever fire a rifle in the direction of a large group of people. Any rifle fired at a distance that short can easily kill someone.

Luckily, his didn't. But of course we didn't know that, yet, and the instructor, a fellow with sufficient power and temper that I once saw him punch a horse we were having difficulty breaking to saddle -- and the horse went down. He made a beeline for James, swearing at the top of his lungs, his face a color purple that made me genuinely fear for James' life. He stopped short, however, when we saw that there was no need to punish James, because James had taken care of that for us. In neglecting to put the stock firmly against his shoulder, James had given the gun's recoil permission to send that stock in any direction it pleased. Which direction had put it directly in the path of James' nose. It was streaming blood and cocked at an angle that told everyone watching it was broken.

Did I mention that we were two and a half hours from the nearest town with a hospital, almost all of that over pitted gravel roads?

James didn't improve with age; I've seen him several times since, and he remains a twit. But one likes to think that if he'd encountered guns at an age before impulse and defiance join to make boys very, very dangerous, he might not have been a twit who could have killed someone.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Misanthropic Snobbery

I abhor comments like this:

"Obviously the public finds amusement in emotional exploitation of people," said Peter Soderling, a technical architect, who prefers The Osbournes brand of reality TV. "It's sad and shows that our society doesn't have a lot of value or depth in their own lives."

To turn that comment around - I always suspect that a broad condemnation of society's choice of entertainment accompanies deep unhappiness with one's own life. Such snobbery is usually a vain effort to make the mirror to one's own soul reflect something more satisfying.

Another interpretation is that the individual quoted thinks the masses need someone to show them how to use their freedom. Who likes that kind of patronizing offal? This form of cultural reactionaryism (yep, that's in the dictionary), available on both the Left (Quindlen) and the Right (Sunstein, perhaps?), is cheap, pernicious and revolting.

Article via Rachel Lucas.

Huh. How about that? My Sunstein rant was exactly one year ago today.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Guns and Baywatch

I've not been able to get worked up about gun control. I learned how to shoot a rifle as a kid, but I don't own a gun now. Guns actually worry me less than large ktichen knives. It's harder to keep the latter away from your kids and still make them accessible for cooking.

It's clear that control advocates often use ridiculous utopian/authoritarian arguments about the potential benefits of gun control. On the other hand, it's difficult to see the right to owning guns as having a meaning even remotely similar to the significance it enjoyed in the 18th century. Would a gun in every household really stop a modern military totalitarian state?

Perhaps I need to think more about it.This is an interesting post by Rachel Lucas and one of her readers.

Here's my favorite line:

Our grandparents walked on the moon, man! And why is it that of all we produce and all we exult, the only things that seem to have caught on in Europe are McDonald's and Baywatch?

He forgot David Hasselhof's song library. Oh yeah - they didn't get that from us.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

White Men Can't Supervise

Today I took a securities "continuing education" exam. As I am a supervisor (Series 8), it focused on office/branch supervisory issues. The new format of these tests is a presentation of video vignettes, showing brokers, supervisors and clients interacting. There are even filed documents to review in each case. It is all held together with a little graphic "city" where you click on different buildings to start different cases. I'm not sure why the "city" thing, since you have no choice as to what the next case will be. There is the appearance of choice, but no real choice, which is somehow appropriate.

There is also the appearance of "a test" but no real test. If you get something wrong, the computer tells you to try again. So it's more of an educational video game session than a test. I think if you really stink up the place they send a note to your compliance officer. You can't be a potted plant and "pass", but a lobotomy wouldn't be a serious obstacle - as long as you can find your way to the testing center.

I've been taking these sorts of exams (including the original ones that actually require correct answers and a passing grade) for many years, so there are a few important rules of acknowledging the bureacracy's omniscience. When in doubt:

1. "report it to the compliance department" is always a good answer
   
2. likewise, so is "investigate further"
   
3. Any answer suggesting you "assume" any knowledge is wrong
   
4. if the question allows more than one right answer, click everything that doesn't sound downright silly
   
most important- there are never exceptions. Never.

In this new age of aggressively multicultural video vignettes, there are a few new and annoying rules:

• Brokers that are recognizable minorities don't do anything wrong
  
• Older white men are poor and lazy supervisors - criticize their actions with abandon in your answers! They tolerate not only aggressive brokers with criminal clients, but now drunks and serial sexual harassers.
  
• Young white men and women are overly aggressive with their clients. A really good-looking white woman is trouble. Fire her. It's only a matter of time before you find out what secrets she's hiding behind her devilishly attractive facade.
  
• click on all the answers, they love that. About 40% of my questions today were correct with every single answer checked.
  

It's not, of course, that I think the test-writers have it out for white people, it's just that they know they will get endless crap if they make a minority a "bad guy". Nonetheless, as an approaching-old white guy, it wears on you after a while.

By my count, one African-American supervisor received criticism once in the course of my test. "How could this conversation have gone better"? we are asked, after a client who has been trading on insider information gets offended at the supervisor's suggestion that he has been...trading on insider information.

There is a new section on hiring practices. I found myself resenting it because it incorporated diversity hiring into it's "correct" answers (something that's morally correct isn't necessarily legally or factually correct, folks). One of the answers I got wrong suggested I should inquire into an applicant's ethnic background. If you should ever be interviewed by me, you will not be asked this question. But all of that is irrelevant - hiring practices, beyond the basics that allow or deny a securities registration, are not a matter of securities regulation and did not belong on this test at all. I don't need a test to tell me not to hire a drunk or a womanizer. You can still vote for one, of course.

Anyway, this is all funded through levies on firms and trading activity, so ultimately you pay for it. I thought you might want to see how your money works for you.

One of the points emphasized today was that office managers should contact the clients of the brokers they supervise. I've had an account with another broker (I'm a money manager by trade, not a broker) for 13 years, and I've never once spoken with the office/branch manager. I bet I'm the rule, not the exception. Have any of you been contacted?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Deficit Spending

These guys say that an increase in the projected long-term budget deficit of 1% of GDP increases the long-term interest rate by 50 to 100 basis points (between 0.5 and 1%).

That implies, among other things, that our failure to deal with Social Security and Medicare is costing us money, since they're the largest component of long-term projections (yes, mis amigos rosados, they dwarf even The Evil Bush Tax Cut For the Rich).

From the desk of Jane Galt:

How boring am I?

Remember My Tivo Thinks I'm Gay? Tonight I found out that my TiVo thinks I want it to record the channel that tells you what's on. Presumably I'm so dull that I will enjoy, hours later, scrolling for hours through what I might have been watching if I'd been home.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Flexible Criticism

'Theodore Dalrymple' decries the rise of violent crime in Britain in the Wall Street Journal:

Britain is now the world leader in very little, with the single possible exception of crime.

Recent figures published by the U.N. show that Britain is now among the most crime-ridden countries in the world: Its citizens are much more likely to be attacked or robbed on the street, or have their houses burgled, than their counterparts in, say, Russia or South Africa, let alone the U.S. Everyday experience in Britain is quite sufficient to establish that we now live in a deeply criminalized society.

He goes on to describe the problem in terms that have a certain...universal ring, I think:

In the war against civility, the savages have it all their own way....

...The response of the British liberal intelligentsia and the political class to the crime wave that has engulfed our society makes a jellyfish look solid. Witness the British middle class in full retreat. Every conceivable argument has been used to avoid acknowledging the painful reality of what we have so heedlessly wrought over so short a period. Some try to suggest that crime hasn't really increased, but that it is just more fully reported now than ever before. Others venture that there is more theft because people have more possessions (the first time wealth rather than poverty has been blamed for crime). And so on, ad infinitum.

As the politicians dither and bicker, I am reminded of the Romanian peasant proverb: The whole village is on fire, but grandmother wants to finish combing her hair.

At the root of the British inability to confront the problem is snobbery. There is a reluctance on the part of the upper echelons of society to believe that the lower echelons are fully human, and therefore responsible for their own acts and decisions. No discussion with a British liberal about the growing incivility, criminality and violence of British life is complete without reference to Hogarth's Gin Lane, the implication being that 'twas ever thus. This, of course, is nonsense. But it does establish that the British liberal intelligentsia believes the lower classes are genetically and irredeemably, utter scum.

To coin a phrase, indeed.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Time to Go

Seems Link Chafee is calling for Lott to resign. And y'all wanted to kick him out of your party.

Meanwhile, Whitlock's got the complete summary of events and commentary up to now. Funniest thing I've read all day.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Brave New World

Richard Bennett ably demonstrates why you have to take millenial-type technology blather with a grain of salt.

Sometimes technology really is transformational in unimaginable ways: in 1910, or even 1920, could you have imagined the revolution the automobile would bring about in mating rituals, family relations, consumer habits -- without even touching on the industrial and military revolutions it precipitated?

On the other hand, for every automobile there's a helicopter or videophone that didn't meet its early promise. Or a Thomas Watson who misses the trend. This feature from Newsday shows just how dangerous -- to one's reputation -- predicting the future can be.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Are Republicans Racist?

That seems to be the conclusion of the left half of the Punditariat. It also seems to be, tenatively, the line they've decided to take in policy battles over the next year. (Thanks, Trent!) Personally, I think it's a political loser. All their arguments, Trent Lott and the execrable Bob Jones excepted, seem to be based on one of two no-very-compelling strategies:

a) Drag out things that happened 20 years ago and wave them around like a golden retriever with a dead fish in its mouth.

As I believe I've mentioned, I happen to be related to The Swing Voter. Specifically, she is my mother, whose vote has predicted nearly every election I can remember.

The Swing Voter thinks this sounds like my younger sister bringing up the horrendous things I did to her when I was seven -- not very relevant to making judgements about today. The Swing Voter also notes that the Democrats, whose memories of 20 years ago are so fresh, seem unable to recall 35 years ago, when members of their party were rioting to keep blacks out of their schools.

Neither argument is going to win an election.

b) Argue that certain policy items are racist because the black caucus does not like them.

Probably 90% of Jewish groups in this country support increased military funding for Israel. Is opposing that anti-semitic? Of course not, though I'm sure you can find some bunch of idiots who will make the argument. And no doubt some of the people who oppose military aid to Israel are anti-Semitic; that doesn't tell you anything about the validity of the idea. Which brings up variation b1):

Racists are in favor of [Insert policy idea]; therefore people who are in favor of it are racists.

Memo to Democrats: you need to stop this before someone points out that many of your policy ideas were big favorites with Hitler.

Which leads to corollary b2):

You can't claim your policy helps minorities unless the only reason you are in favor of it is to help minorities

Which I think means the Democrats are out of luck on Affirmative Action, since they keep telling us that it benefits all students, of whatever race, by providing diversity.

and b3):

Any Republican policy idea shall be judged by its most repugnant adherents.

Another Memo to Democrats: the Swing Voter, as I mentioned, has children. This sort of argument gets routed to the same part of the neural cortex as "Of course I can't invite Cousin Mandy -- she's in the chess club!" "but all my friends get to lick electrical sockets!" and "If I don't get to die my hair pink, my life will be ruined!"

On the excellent CalPundit, Kevin Drum says that Bryan Preston is out on a limb claiming that the Republicans can be proud of their record on race. Now, I'm not an enormous fan of this sort of article, although to be fair the Democrats have been calling Republicans racists for so long that its possible some of them need a little rallying. But Kevin's criticism misses some important points.

On the military, Kevin summarizes Preston's argument thus:

In addition to its main mission of protecting the United States and projecting its power globally, the U.S. military is one of our society's great equalizers. Anyone of any race can volunteer for service, and entering the services brings many privileges and responsibilities.

Uh huh. African-Americans are allowed to join the army, Republicans support the army, therefore Republicans support racial equality. Right.

Actually, the military has been one of the most important vehicles of integration. For a couple of generations now it has taken poor black and hispanic kids, taught them a skill, given them the opportunity for an education, and made them a hell of a lot more marketable than they otherwise would have been. Unlike the Democratic favorite, affirmative action, the military benefits the poor and disadvantaged, rather than the primarily middle- and upper-class kids who reap the rewards of college admissions preferences. Since it is precisely those disadvantaged kids who affirmative action is supposed to be helping in the minds of the public, this is not a strong talking point for the Democrats.

Inside the military, the committment to advancing minorities through the traditionally Republican goals of pushing, rather than pulling (a pull strategy would be affirmative action; a push strategy would be Prep for Prep), and a relentless hounding of those who practice racial discrimination that would probably be unconstitutional in civilian life. That's why we had a black joint chief of staff before we had a black Fortune 500 CEO. Let's be frank: the majority of the Democratic leadership doesn't like the military, except when it lands bases in their district. So the Republicans can claim some street cred for supporting one of the largest integration programs in the country.

Kevin Drum also says the Republicans can't take credit for vouchers because it started in the Christian movement:

Now, I'm not a die-hard opponent of vouchers, but the history of vouchers is clearly not based on any kind of commitment to racial justice. Republican conservatives began fighting for them two decades ago, and the fight was led primarily by members of the Christian right, who wanted public funding for Christian schools. Then, sometime in the mid-90s, after it became clear that this argument wasn't resonating with enough people, the GOP hit on a new argument: vouchers are good for black people!

It's possible that they are. But it's also clear that Republican support of vouchers has nothing to do with concern for blacks. It's just a good argument to gain support for something they already wanted.

This, then, is why blacks don't trust the Republican party. Occasionally, and mostly by coincidence, they support things that the African-American community wants, but they never actually support the African-American community itself. If they ever want to earn their trust, they will need to support something — anything — that has racial equality as its primary purpose, not just as an afterthought.

How do you support a community? "I'm in favor of Irish People!" "Vote yes on Greeks!" "I stand for motherhood, Apple pie, and Latvian-Americans!"

You support a community by being in favor of the things they're in favor of. When African Americans are polled on the particulars of affirmative action -- a 200 point preference on the SAT's, for example -- they poll against. And when they're polled on vouchers, no matter how you massage the question to make vouchers sound awful, they're for. Is there an issue more important to the african-american community -- or any community -- than the education of its children?

And contrary to Kevin's assertions, most Republicans are not in favor of vouchers because they support Christian schools, because most voucher supporters aren't evangelicals. It is precisely those inner city blacks most voucher supporters are thinking of, the ones held hostage in useless schools by the educational establishment. The evangelical schooling movement is tiny, not enough to swing a Republican primary, much less an election.

If you want to demonize an idea by who it's associated with, try this one: opposition to vouchers comes largely from two groups of people. Teacher's unions, who are afraid of being shown up; and homeowners in good school districts, who don't want to lose the price premium their house commands due to their superior school.

And of course, Democratic politicians who fear the teachers unions more than they fear losing the black vote.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Take That Luddites!

Who says that cold technology can't give you a heartwarming Christmas miracle?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Hmmm. . .

TalkLeft links to a study arguing that the murder rate has fallen because of better access to medical care. It's one of those unobvious intuitions that make you smack yourself in the head and go "Duh!"

On the other hand, I doubt it accounts for all the variance, since other violent crime has also dropped. But I would find it interesting to know whether Britain's smaller size accounts for the difference in their crime rates, since per capita they outstrip us in everything but murder, which is also the only crime judged on the health outcome. If their victims are closer to hospitals, and thus don't die en route, that might account for it.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Can It Be True?

Somehow, one always felt it would come to this.

(via Radley Balko)

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Mirror Mirror on The Wall

Orrin Judd thinks conservatives risk lazy overconfidence and intellectual decline.

....conservatives of D'Souza's age--which is mine, and I've been watching them since we were in college--are generationally in the same position as liberals of (Lionel) Trilling's or Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s.

Imagine that.

UPDATE: These are not Orrin's words, as noted in the comments, but those of George Packer in The Nation in a lengthy excerpt. In any event, tt was the extraordinary possibility of comparing D'Souza to Schlesinger Jr. that struck me, as well as the continuing meme of strong ideological movements needing deep intellectual opposition to avoid "triumphalism".

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Ever Wondered. . .

What Christmas would be like if it was a Jewish holiday? Frankly, no. But luckily, someone took the time to think out what the halakha might look like:

3. DURING THE SHMITTA YEAR, A JEW MAY NOT CUT THE TREE DOWN, BUT IT SHOULD BE DONE BY A GENTILE. HOWEVER, SINCE THE TREE IS INEDIBLE, THE PROBLEMS OF "KEDUSHAS SHVIIS" WHICH APPLY TO THE ESROG DO NOT APPLY TO THE XMAS TREE.

4. THE TREE MUST BE BRIGHT GREEN. BRIGHT RED, or a mixture of green and red, IS ALSO ACCEPTABLE FOR A XMAS TREE,11 BUT BROWN IS NOT. THERE MAY BE ONE BROWN SPOT NEAR THE BOTTOM OF THE TREE,12 BUT IN THE TOP HALF OF THE TREE, EVEN ONE BROWN SPOT WILL INVALIDATE THE TREE. A TRULY PIOUS PERSON WILL MAKE SURE TO BRING ALONG A XMAS TREE EXPERT WHEN HE GOES TO LOOK FOR HIS TREE.13

11 Because such trees do not grow red naturally, many Sefaradim adorn the tree with red poinsettia flowers. Ashkenazim prefer poinsettas.
12 Or even two, provided they are on opposite sides so they cannot be both seen at the same time.
13 But it is more macho to pretend to be an expert and pick the tree out himself.

Tee-hee! Go read the rest.

(Via Plum Crazy)

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Goodness!

I'm blushing.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Strike!

So it looks like the transit union may walk.

It's not immediately obvious why. The state's Taylor Law is pretty draconian; striking workers not only lose two days pay for every day they strike, but also (I'm told), the union loses the right to automatic deduction of their dues.

Nor is it likely that they will get what they want, for several reasons. First of all, Toussaint has challenged Bloomberg publicly; if Bloomberg caves, his administration is done. Second, as I've said, the MTA does not cover its expenses out of its own revenues; the "surplus" the union keeps agitating about was a one-time gift from Pataki last year to keep the agency from raising fares before the election. There can be no repeat this year because the city and state budgets are both deep in deficit.

Most interesting is the inter-union warfare. After last year's record raises to 1199 (the healthcare union), the other public unions are looking to get theirs. The city cannot afford to let a raise go through for the TWU, because if it does, the police and firefighters will demand even more lavish payouts. The size of those departments, and those payrolls, dwarfs the city's contribution to the MTA. Bloomberg needs to draw the line here.

If Toussaint strikes, he'll certainly cost his unions something. But a one or two day strike, while a mild inconvenience, will not force the City to concessions, and will be a public relations disaster for the union. A longer strike would be a public relations catastrophe -- and a financial catastrophe for the workers, who we keep hearing from the union are practically on the edge of starvation.

So, why would he strike against the interests of his workers? Well, just as boards and managers do not always act in the interests of their shareholders, unions do not always act in the interest of their membership. For example, it's very common for unions to resist plans to reduce the workforce through attrition when productivity improvements reduce the number of workers needed in a given job. Even in cases where the workforce reduction won't hurt any of the current membership, the union will often make pay and benefit concessions in order to implement featherbedding rules that increase future membership at the expense of current members. This does not benefit the current members -- to whom, remember, the union leadership has a fiduciary relationship as binding as that of boards to shareholders -- but it does benefit the union leadership, by giving them a larger, more powerful organization.

Toussaint is a new president. If he takes down Bloomberg, he will be a hero to his members, and his union will grow in power. Even if his membership ends up little better off -- and remember, strikers who only work 40 hours a week will lose a full days pay every day the union is out, a net loss of 5 weeks pay in two weeks -- he could end up better off. But given the unlikelihood of a favorable settlement, it's hard to see how his members will be.

As of this writing, they're still talking. That's a very good sign, as these things usually go pretty close to the wire. If not -- well, I'll be walking the three miles to work in the rain tomorrow. I try to look at it as an opportunity to get a little closer to our pioneer ancestors.

Update Reader emails to say that there will be livery cars picking up at the bus stops. Actually, I don't mind walking unless the weather's really vicious, and I can certainly use the excercise after the holiday festivities. I may take a livery car if there isn't a lot of demand, but for any youngish, fit-ish New Yorkers out there -- try to remember that there are probably a lot of people who need to get around who can't walk as far as they need to go. If there's a long line at the bus stops, why not stretch your legs a little?

Update II The union just blinked.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Have Your Peace-Pipe and Smoke it Too!

Well, now that a variety of hollywood celebrities, including the guy who plays the President on TV and former cast-members of Benson and Dino de Laurentiis' version of King Kong have come out against a possible war on Iraq I am forced to reconsider my position.

In other news, dental surgery, hair replacement and breast implants increase reasoning ability.

The full-page ad placed by these folks in the New York Times today stated that "Iraq can be disarmed peacefully."

"We've got the United Nations doing exactly what they were designed to do -- what we want them to do," said Carroll, who also signed the letter. "For God's sake, let's take 'yes' for an answer and end this march to war."

I am amazed that anybody can just ignore how we got here. Forswear war if you like, but don't fool yourself with the fantasy that pacifism might actually be more effective in disarming Saddam than the threat of force. Only serious threats brought the inspectors back to Iraq in the first place.

To be fair, one of the celebs makes a passing reference to reality - Here's self-deluding pacifist and milquetoast M*A*S*H star Mike Farrell:

Mike Farrell, a longtime liberal activist, said U.S. threats to go to war if necessary to disarm Iraq may have been necessary to get Iraq to allow U.N. weapons inspectors to resume, but are now undercutting the inspectors' chances of success.

Force only worked in the past. Two months ago, that is.

Apparently these folks can't make sense without a script. If we take their advice and publicly indicate our unwillingness to go to war, Saddam kicks the inspectors out. So then what? Make him watch their re-runs until he gives up the nukes? What "process" will be left to work?

Pretending that the threats implicit in our Iraq policy are ineffective sabre-rattling is having your cake and eating it too. The celebrities get to cleanse their conscience of the ugly business of projecting power against a violent thugocracy yet still claim credit for any positive results! Tastes great, less troubling!

Saddam Hussein has never paid attention to anything but the barrel of a gun and his own sick appetites. No amount of simple-minded faith will change that.

Oh, and Saddam has no connections with terrorism either.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Free-Breathing Bloggers

Funny that Jane should write about albuterol and asthma. I did not realize we had the affliction in common.

As a child my asthma was quite serious. I was hospitalized several times, and asthma and fear of asthma interfered with many activities.

The letter Jane reminds me of the bad old days. As a kid in the '70s, most of the "controller" therapies were not available at all in the U.S., so we relied on bronchodilators such as albuterol. Incidentaly, albuterol was not available until about 1976 and is far superior to its predecessors (theophylin and isopreterenol-based, if I remember) in terms of side effects such as jitters and stomach discomfort.

I believe the only "controller" available in the U.S. in the early 1970s was Cromolyn Sodium ("Intal"). Intal works primarily to prevent the histamine reaction by coating the mast cells. Intal was helpful for allergic asthma, but it was no panacea. One of its additional drawbacks back then was it could not be atomized (Cromolyn and its successors are atomized now). In order to get it into your lungs, you had to use a spinhaler. A Spinhaler consists of a propeller mounted in a special sleeve. You place a capsule full of powder in the windward side of the propeller, slide the sleeve down to puncture holes in the side of the capsule, then suck hard through the sleeve. Centrifugal force brings the powder out of the capsule where it is sucked through the propeller into your lungs. It was both uncomfortable, awkward and conspicuous, as Spinhalers make noise like a Rock'em Sock'em Robot losing its head.

The asthmatic's saviour is inhaled steroids. Nothing keeps the airwaves quite so smooth as a regular application of cortisone or Fluticosone. Interestingly, while I was stuck with my Intal turbo-prop, Canada had approved steroid sprays for prescription use. In 1977 we began to smuggle in Vanceril, one of the first formulations. That was the beginning of the end of my asthma problems. Of course it was many years before we could subscribe it in the U.S. Since about 1984, these medications (Flovent being the most common) are ubiquitous, and form the backbone of almost any asthma treatment.

Oral steroids (pills) are likewise an incredibly powerful means of calming a severe attack, although they are not fast-acting. In today's emergency rooms the standard procedure is to administer steroids in liquid suspension and give the patient bronchodilators via nebulizer.

But that's a recent development. When I was hospitalized in the late '70s and early '80s, they just kept pumping me full of Epinephrine and Aminophyllin, which caused a racing heart beats and heightened anxiety. These side effects actually aggravated the asthma attack to some degree. Doctors in the U.S. had a real problem with the potential side effects of steroids. My specialist had to argue with my school physicians and hospital attendings endlessly to get me treated with oral and spray steroids as appropriate. These medical professionals always seemed to be worried about side effects, such as sterility, that are associated with anabolic steroids (and see Dayn Perry in Reason for some skepticism on the other effects). They also seemed to react very defensively to specialist advice.

I am still an asthmatic, but today's medications (such as Advair)make it easy to control with minimal effort. I even run middle and long-distances now, which continues to amaze me. I took a few lessons from my experience:

• The lifestyle benefits of modern medicine are priceless. I would be dead without them. Medicine may be getting more expensive, but we are getting infinitely more for our money.
  
• Doctors, while men/women of science, are often married to the science they were taught in medical school. As they get older, they often become reactionary and close-minded. (incidentally, my father, brother, father-in-law and sister-in-law are doctors)
  
• The FDA is too damn slow approving new medications. I've got the unpleasant experiences and permanent lung-scarring to prove it.
  

Incidentally, Jane's writer is correct. We would be better off getting Flovent available over the counter than giving everyone albuterol. While it is possible to take too much topical steroid and damage your lungs, it is unclear why anyone would do so.

Bronchodilators are much more tempting to overdose, as athletes use them and they come to hand in periods of high stress, as they did to Jane. Too high a dose of common bronchodilators can actually make asthma worse, and an overdose can kill you. It happened to a model some years ago, but I forget her name.

Asthma has apparently become a serious problem in inner-city areas. My doctor tells me there are some recent studies indicating a correlation between the incidence of childhood asthma and the concentration of atomized tire-rubber in air samples. Then again..

I'm obviously not a doctor or medically trained. I just play one when I medicate myself...

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Can the West Seduce the Arab World with Our Dating Culture?

For no apparent reason, today I was thinking about the assertion I've seen, on blogs and elsewhere (and yes, you may assume this means I'm too lazy to go find the links) that all we need to do is wave the prospect of actually marrying someone you choose yourself at the young people in the Arab/Muslim world, and they'll jump ship for our obviously superior system. This rests on an extremely flawed analysis which considers the decision to marry as largely separated from questions other than the romantic interest between the two people. This is based on the Western, especially the American, view of marriage, which is both itself far too simplistic, and simply inapplicable to a wide swath of the world's people in their current condition.

Don't get me wrong -- despite the fact that studies have repeatedly shown that people in arranged marriages are about as happy as people in marriages where they choose their own spouse, I'm a big fan of romantic marriage. But marriage as an institution takes place within a whole web of social and economic connections, and you can't just consider a society's rules about marriage in isolation. Arabs don't have arranged marriages just because they're mean, sexist bastards; there are reasons that they arrange things the way that they do.

Specifically, arranged marriages take place in societies where the extended family is both the basic social unit, and the basic economic unit, (and often the basic political unit) of the culture. A Saudi girl will, after her marriage, socialize exclusively with her family and (mostly) her husband's. Those families will provide her with the economic support for herself and her children. The dowry so often decried by feminists usually actually belongs to the woman, and is used to support her in the event of death or divorce. The arrangements that are usually derided here as primitive and cruel are in fact a complex system designed to ensure that women and children are supported. (I wouldn't want to live in the system. Perhaps many of those living in it wouldn't either, though I haven't talked to any and thus couldn't say. But you can't change one part of a system without examining the systemic effects of that change.)

In the case of those who assume that choosing your own spouse is an unalloyed good, they are failing to understand the complex system of obligations that accompanies marriage in a society where extended families form the primary economic and social support. The obligations that a marriage in America conveys upon the parents-in-law are not trivial, but they are nowhere near as binding as the obligations that not only parents, but also the entire extended family, takes on to the new spouse, and often their extended family, in traditional societies. Ever wonder why so many plays and novels prior to the twentieth century feature families having, er, violent reactions to their children's choice of spouse? Well, before the industrial revolution (and after it for some time, due to cultural lag), a poorly chosen spouse conferred all sorts of potential trouble on the family. Their debts could be settled upon the family in many places; their actions could dishonor the family. In earlier times, your family might be expecte